For those who don’t know, I’m currently the Data Warehouse Architect for a large scale and complex multi-tenant data warehousing project. Fortunately, the project is being created in SQL Server 2012 and I thrilled to be using the new features. Let me preface this blog post by admitting that my experience with using the SSIS 2012 Catalog, SSISDB, is fairly limited, but then again most people are in the same boat since adoption of 2012 has been fairly slow.

However, I’ve run into some problems which aren’t getting a lot of attention yet, but I’m fairly certain they will in the near future. Let’s break them down.

Initial Catalog Setup Issues

I won’t explain step by step how to create the Integration Services Catalog, because others already have. However, you’ll notice from the following screenshot that very few settings are available when the catalog is created.

I wish that Microsoft would upgrade the Create Catalog screen to enable the user to specify SSISDB settings upon creation. For example, right click the SSISDB under Integration Services Catalogs, and select Properties. The following settings can and should be set:

Whether to Clean Logs Periodically – Defaults to True

Retention Period in Days – Defaults to 365

Default Logging Level – Defaults to Basic

Maximum Number of Old Versions Per Project – Defaults to 10

Whether to Periodically Remove Old Versions – Defaults to True

I wish we could set those at create time. As I’ll discuss in a minute, the default values can be disastrous for many installations.

SSISDB Database Ignores Model Database Settings

For some reason, when you create the SSISDB Catalog, the corresponding SSISDB database ignores the Model database settings. It appears that no matter what my Model database is set to, SSISDB defaults to set file sizes for the Data File and Log, 10% Growth Rate, and Full Recovery Model. I’ve reached out to Microsoft, but haven’t received an answer as to why.

This has become problematic for us because we’ve deliberately set up our Model Databases so that Simple Recovery is used in our Development and QA Environments while Full Recovery is used in our Production environments. I’ve had to set up periodic checking on all of our servers looking for databases in full recovery mode that aren’t getting transaction log backups to avoid runaway T-Log growth issues.

SSISDB Performance Issues

I’ve come to the conclusion that the SSISDB Database will not scale at all. I became painfully aware of this because of a problem we had in a “pseudo” Production environment. Our first nasty surprise was T-Log growth, because the database incorrectly defaulted to Full Recovery mode which I fixed by shrinking the log. Before you mentally criticize me dear reader, please keep in mind this wasn’t an actual Production environment and the data being kept in SSISDB was inconsequential so far.

Another issue became apparent shortly afterward. We were running with the default settings of Basic level logging, 365 Days Retention, and 10 Versions of the project being kept. Our SSIS project is already fairly large with around 50 packages, but it was only being run periodically in this environment approximately once or twice per week. We are not even hitting this thing very hard. However, the SSISDB database size was growing rapidly anyway. In this particular situation, it had grown to 60GB. While I realize that 60GB is not very large, SSISDB performance slowed to a crawl. In any of our environments, when the SSISDB approaches 50GB the performance degrades dramatically. The first sign of this is that the built in reports take longer and longer to return data and eventually seem to stop returning data at all.

Unfortunately this pseudo Production server was set up with very little hard drive space, 100GB. So, I started receiving free space warnings after the SSISDB database reached 60GB.

I did a little research about reducing the size and performance issues with the SSISDB. I lowered the Retention Period to 7 days, set the Default Logging Level to None, and reduced the Maximum Number of Old Project Versions to 1. We don’t need to save old versions of our project as we are using TFS source control. You are using source control right?

Keep in mind that changing your logging level to None is not advisable in most production environments, however as of this time we are using a 3rd party product to monitor our packages so this isn’t an issue for us. I suspect that most of you will use the Basic level, but set the Retention Levels back and run the cleanup job often to avoid performance issues. Anyway I changed my settings using the following script.

Then I proceeded to start the “SSIS Server Maintenance Job” automatically generated when you create the catalog. Wow, that was a mistake.

Don’t Touch That Button

The job ran for 2 hours and blew up the transaction log even though it was in Simple Recovery Model. I then started receiving emails that the server had completely run out of space. When I checked the error log, I found an error indicating that the Log was out of space and a checkpoint record could not be written.

I immediately started researching and found this article about the cleanup job causing user packages to fail. If you read between the lines, you’ll see that the SSISDB is not properly indexed to handle the cleanup job. In my case, I had to drop the SSISDB, recreate it, and apply the script above to avoid similar issues in the future. Once again, this was not a huge problem for me because it wasn’t truly a Production environment and we rely on a third party product for our SSIS logging anyway. Don’t forget that even if you do change your settings, you must also schedule the clean up job to run regularly. If you allow too much history to be accumulated, you may suffer the same fate I did when running it.

My take on all of this is that SSISDB is not ready for prime time. I don’t think I’m being unfair with that statement. I do appreciate the fact that the SSIS Catalog is a great addition to SSIS 2012, but I expect to be able to use it in Production, running packages every 5 or 15 minutes, retaining months worth of history, and for it to perform regardless.

After writing this article I ran across this excellent article on SSIS 2012 Catalog Indexing, and time permitting I will implement his suggestions and report back. Are any of you having similar issues with your SSIS 2012 Catalog (SSISDB)?

Mine just went to hell. Runaway ssis package and now the database is taking forever to recover. My guess is that it won’t recover and I will have to blow it away and start over. Up front they did say you needed to set up some indexing for performance. But I agree that some of this should have been done prior to its delivery to the market.

I can confirm that this problem still exists in SQL 2014 SP1. I’ve a huge DB for only 50 packages (12 GB) running for about two months and the LOG has collapsed tonight (23 GB). DB on FULL, Retention Period = 365.